Decompress/Unzip Web Content with Content-Encoding: gzip (using PHP - file_get_contents() and gzinflate())

If you are using file_get_contents() to grab content from the web and process using PHP, you may bump into web contents that are compressed using gzencode.

Here's a solution to decompress those content (simplified for easy reference):

<?php $qdata = array('http' =>     array(      'method' => 'POST',      'user_agent'=> $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']     )    ); $context = stream_context_create($qdata); $data = file_get_contents("http://www.urltograbmystuff.com", false, $context); $u = gzinflate(substr($data,10,-8)); . . . ?>

The trick is to use gzinflate() and do remember to change the URL to your target web address. Process your $u (string that contains the HTML codes of the target) afterwards.